CHAPTER XXIII
FORM OF BUILDING.

FOR an institution like that referred to, it is believed that the best, most convenient, and most economical form will be found to be a centre building with wings on each side, so arranged as to give ample accomodations for the resident officers and their families, and for the classification and comfort of the patients, and all employed in their care. A building having a basement entirely above ground, and two stories above this, is not objectionable, and will generally be adopted on account of its being less expensive, and of smaller extent on the ground than one of only two stories. The centre building and projecting portions of the wings, may be carried up a few feet higher, but the wards generally should not be. In the highest part of the structure, as in a dome on the centre building, the water tanks should be provided for.

In the centre building should be the kitchens, sculleries, main store rooms, a reception room for patients, a general business office, superintendent's office, medical office and library, visiting rooms for friends of patients, a public parlor and managers' room, a lecture room or chapel, and apartments for the superintending physician's family,—in case that officer resides in the building,—and for other officers of the institution.

The wings should be so arranged as to have at least eight distinct classes of patients on each side; each class should occupy a separate ward, and each ward should have in it a parlor, or possibly an alcove as a substitute, a dining room with a dumb waiter connected with it, and a speaking tube or telephone leading to the kitchen or some other central part of the basement story, a corridor, single lodging rooms for patients, an associated dormitory for not less than four beds, communicating with an attendant's chamber, one or two rooms of sufficient size for a patient with a special attendant, a clothes room, a bath room, a wash and sink room, and two or more water closets. There should also be provided for each sex in its appropriate wing, at least one ward for patients who are too ill to remain in their own chambers, a railroad for the distribution of food, etc., two work rooms, a museum and reading room, a school room, a series of drying closets, at least one on each story, or, better, one for each ward, and various other fixtures, the general character, position, and arrangement of which will be more particularly referred to, when describing the accompanying plans, in which they will all be found provided for. The parlors may be dispensed with in the wards for the most excited patients, but not elsewhere, unless the plan of having alcoves of good size, as already referred to, in the middle of each ward, may be accepted as a substitute, and all the other conveniences suggested will be as necessary for the excited as for any other class.